Live Link Face recorded animation floating head

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hi there, I am expecting some problems with the body and face animation of a custom character that I created. This character has the body rigged and separated from the head, and the head has a pretty basic rig and all 52 blend keys, both meshes combined in a single Actor Blueprint.

I imported the character into UE5 and made a basic animation blueprint for the head so it works with the Live Link Face app. Next, I used the take recorder to record my facial motion and retargeted an idle animation from Mixamo to the body. Everything worked as expected but the head is not following the body’s idle animation, instead, it is floating static in the air.

My current AnimBp:

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Character in Sequencer:

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Then I tried to join head and body meshes to a single one, sharing the same rig, and this kinda worked because I recorded a new facial mocap, and retargeted the same idle animation to the body. The character moves but the body animation looks modified. I suppose that somehow the rotation and transfer of the body are adding each other values.

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I’ve always worked with Metahumans so this problem is usually solved right out of the box with MH characters.

I hope you guys could help me on this one. I really appreciate it.

Edit: …Actually I just realized that in the video, the face animation kinda changes when I delete the idle body animation.

2

Is there a set masterpose component in the begin play of the character?

Parts drifitng is often due to a lack of that.

3

Oh I did not know that. I made a quick research and found this tutorial about modular characters.

I followed the steps and, yes the head now is attached to the body, but the neck is like wrong oriented and the facial animations do not work anymore. But the body idle animation is still working.

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4

Depends on the purpose.
On something you need to use to record a performance you have to just use parenting (socket the head on a specific bone socket and adjust its position for instance).

On the final product since the animation is combined and finalized you can use the modular character approach.